Categories
Poll PowerShell SQL Server Syndicated Syndication

PowerShell: Giving in to the Inevitable?


Here’s a quick question posed to my technical brethren: Have you drank the PowerShell Kool-Aid yet?

I’ve sat back and tested the waters here and there and I see that you can do some pretty cool stuff with it but I’m an admitted GUI lover at the moment so what does this buy me? This topic comes on the heels of the Microsoft Tech-Ed keynote and the fact that PowerShell scripts will now be generated on-the-fly ala SQL Server Management Studio did for T-SQL (Thanks Brent Ozar for pointing this out). I’ll admit I have learned quite a lot just in T-SQL by using that Script To function but will having this power in PowerShell really do much for me? What are your thoughts? Comment your techy hearts out.

Categories
Tips vmware

How to Kill a Stuck VM in ESX 3.5

This morning my VM’s decided to become schizophrenic and stop opening consoles. Virtual Center showed the VM’s as still running but some weren’t responding to pings, some were but all had this error when trying to connect via console:

error connecting to vmfs volumes

Ok, well luckily this was a test environment VM so I tried hard restarting it and I got this lovely message:

Operation failed since another task is in progress.

Really?!? Crap, ok time to head to the oracle of all knowledge Google and BLAM-O I found this thread in the VMware Communities forum with my solution. I learned some nice new things including nice commands via the vmware-cmd as well as the vm-support commands which ended up helping me in the end. Here’s the solution from the thread, thanks to users Duncan Epping and Kim Rubeck for these commands/tips.

vmware-cmd -l = list all the vm’s running, copy and paste the full path to the below command.vmware-cmd <config> stop trysoft
if trysoft doesn’t work you could always kill the process ->
ps -ef | more
find the proces related to the world
kill it.

ps -auxwww | grep -i <vmname>

Find the PID and kill -9 pid

or

vm-support -x – to list vmid’s
vm-support -X <vmid> to kill it.

For the record my solution wound up being identifying the vm’s PID and killing the process directly. After doing that Virtual Center shows the VM as not running. Once that happens simply power it back up like you normally would.

 

Categories
Tips Windows

Got an Installation Stuck in a Loop?

Today I was troubleshooting an issue where an MSI is constantly trying to install itself on the server but cannot find the files needed to complete the install. The errors encountered were the following:

Source: MsiInstaller
Event ID: 1001

Detection of product ‘{GUID}’, feature ‘{program}’ failed during request for component ‘{GUID}’

What happened here was that when the MSI did its install it copied temporary install files in a folder. I believe we ran out of space on that particular server during this time thus throwing the installer for a loop of confusion. So how do you clean up this mess? Well Microsoft offers a tool for free that takes care of situations like these. It’s called the Windows Installer CleanUp Utility.

Here’s the description from the KB article on what it does:

When you are working on your computer and installing a new program, the installation suddenly fails. Now you are left with a partly installed program. You try to install the program again, but you are unsuccessful. Or, maybe you have problems trying to remove an old program because the installation files are corrupted. Do not worry. Windows Installer CleanUp Utility might be able to help. You can use the utility to remove installation information for programs that were installed by using Windows Installer. Be aware that Windows Installer CleanUp Utility will not remove the actual program from your computer. However, it will remove the installation files so that you can start the installation, upgrade, or uninstall over.

After you run the utility, give your machine a restart and try to reinstall the troubled application.

Categories
Syndicated Syndication

SQL Rap by DJ Majik Poultry

Yo…check it. I’m sittin’ here chillin with my Tweetdeck rollin’
When I get word of a SQL Rap contest, the illest rhymes we be extollin’
What’s up for grabs is an iPod Touch
Whatcha gotta do? Well, it ain’t much
Cook up the illest rhymes and sell em like a 3rd party tool
And this first rhyme I’m spittin is aimed at SQLFool

Go-daddy, Go-momma don’t matter the sexI suck at this
This contest brings the baddest DBA’s like an ill-formed Index
What you and Ward started, like Ma$e can’t be stopped
These other sucka emcees are just another table my T-SQL’s gonna drop

Now Ward, aka the SQLTwit
Ready yourself for these rhymes I’m about to spit

You live in the woods, probably pickin berries
Since you’re backwoods I don’t wanna make this too complex like queries
Your lyrical rap styles are tuned like fine code
I heard you can ask for the BrentO discount when purchasing Quest Toad

Speaking of Brent O, his raps are well taken
Damn rapping about him now makes me crave #bacon
He looks like the SQL world’s Tina Fey
Next time you drop by Twitter, drop him a line and say ‘HEYYYY’

My VM snapshots are wrapping up from their orphaned state madness
Sorry to leave you guys with much lyrical sadness
These rhymes are whack but my skills are finger lickin’
So peace to your mothers, a love note from the SQL Chicken!

Categories
SQL Quiz SQL Server Syndicated Syndication

SQL Quiz #4

Well Chris Shaw has continued his awesome SQL Quiz chain and I was lucky enough to get tagged down the line by none other than the SQLFool! Here’s the question on the table this week:

Who has been a great leader in your career and what made them a great leader?

Given the fact that I’m pretty young (26 for those curious) I’m only on my second manager in my true IT career. However with my first manager Jim, I spent almost 5 years under in varying stages of my career.

I first started my career at SWFWMD (Southwest Florida Water Management District) as an intern in their applications group as a web developer. My first experience with Jim was when I got in trouble because I brought in my laptop to do work and plugged in to the network and I went undetected for a few weeks before I got caught (whoops). Jim, at that time, was kind of shadowing our-then IT manager as Jim was slated to take her place after retirement. Jim scared the ever-living hell out of me. After graduation I came back to SWFWMD as a desktop technician and by that time Jim has ascended in to the manager role. Under Jim’s management he had very explicit plans for his section and wanted to make sure his people were up to snuff so to speak. Sometimes his ways were a bit strict but I’ll be damned if he didn’t back his people when it mattered. One of the strengths that Jim has is that he is a huge proponent of education and bettering yourself and strongly enourages his employees in that vein. A thing I liked is that he bought purchased an online training tool and sat down with each of us and laid out his expectations for us in terms of our position and customized a learning path for us in this tool.

At this point of the post you’re probably thinking “yeah, he was…managing, big whoop”. Yes, he was doing what a good manager does but it was the “other stuff” that made him a great leader. At a department retreat we had a consultant come in and do some team-building using the Kepner-Tregoe method. At one point she asked each section within IT who made the decisions in our group (or who was the leader, can’t recall exact phrasing) . Our section laughed when we heard that and all fingers pointed to Jim. This excercise was just an indicator of how strong a leader he was. The other thing I really liked about him was his ability to sit down with you and have a no-BS person-to-person talk. My personal situation at SWFWMD was complicated due to my mother being in a sensitive political position over there. Jim helped me throughout the years deal with the problems that caused every so often. He helped me out a few times when I really broke down and for that I’ll forever be grateful. Jim’s other strength was his ability to look beyond next week. He was always thinking 3 steps ahead in terms of personnel placement and technology adoption. This method has payed off well and to this day SWFWMD is one of the local businesses that is a technology innovator and leader. A testament to this is that Jim is the leader of the Tampa Area VMware User Group!

I’ve rambled enough so let’s see if we can’t get some others to spill their guts!

Chuck Boyce Jr. (aka chuckboycejr) – Works for Quest and got to spend some quality time with in chat during SSWUG Virtual conference
Ward Pond (aka sqltwit) – Another local guy (to me) and hopefully I’ll get to meet at next SSUG meeting
Andy Leonard – I’m not even sure if he has a blog but he just got promoted to managing his ETL team and I’d like to hear his story.

Just FYI, if I follow you on Twitter you’re pretty much in my pool of candidates for tagging in the future.

Categories
Advice DBA SQL Server Syndicated Syndication Tips

Starting the SQL Journey: Part II

So in my last post I talked about my personal journey. In this post I’ll go step-by-step what I did to help along the path of learning all this SQL goodness. 

Tip 1 – Crawl Before You Walk…

Don’t know what a SQL statement is? Think T-SQL is an alternative to Coffee-SQL? Fear not, like everything else in this crazy world there’s tons of resources to learn from. One of the first places I learned anything from was W3 Schools website. The site is more aimed at web developers but they have a section for learning SQL (note: SQL is NOT SQL Server. SQL is a language, SQL Server is a product). There are also numerous other websites that teach SQL from the ground up such as SQL Tutorial or SQLCourse. A quick Google search will get you a plethora of options.

Tip 2 – Choose Thy Path!

Moving on from learning basic SQL syntax its time to learn your product. To learn by theory is one thing but its another to have hands on experience with the tools and actually see what a query result looks like and what not. Now I realize that I’m a SQL Server guy but I’ll be fair and list several vendor options. These are all the free editions of the respective platforms:

While I gave several options, this blog is SQL Server-centric so my examples and walk-throughs will keep within that realm. Which brings us to the next step…

Step 3 – Don’t Pigeon Hole Yourself, LEARN EVERYTHING!

Ok maybe not everything but you get the gist. This tip not only applies to learning your specific product but pretty much anything. Just because you’re a DBA doesn’t mean you shouldn’t/can’t learn some basic web development so you know what’s going on on the other side of your queries and vice versa. One of the things that allowed me to reach my current position is that I was always looking to learn more, more, more. Yes, I’m a SQL Server guy but what’s Oracle? How’s it work? What are the differences between SQL Server and Oracle? What else is out there? Even within SQL Server you have so much to learn than just basic server setup. There’s not only the administration piece but there’s also performance tuning, all the business intelligence pieces and the wide world of development and much more. I personally ended up going down the DBA track myself but I still like to play around with the Business Intelligence pieces like Reporting Services and SSIS since they’re interesting pieces unto themselves and work-wise I’m a better employee and professional if I’m able to understand all the pieces of the puzzle.

Tip 4 – There’s a Community, Make Use of It

One of the best things I ever did was start attending user groups. My first experience with them was with the Tampa VMware User Group community. I lucked out since my manager volunteered to be the group’s leader so meetings were held in our offices. The meetings were useful since you got to meet others in the community who made use of the same technology in different ways. Getting to meet others and swap stories was a really cool experience. From there I learned about the local SQL user groups (SQL Server and the BI group) and started attending those. Lately I’ve been branching out more in to the community by making use of social networking tools such as LinkedIn and Twitter. I’ve also started contributing to the community by starting this blog. I can’t tell you how much more satisfying experience it has been, for me anyways, to really be actively involved in the technical community.

Tip 5 – That Guy Seems Smart, Let’s Ask Him!

Before I started getting actively involved with the community my primary objective was just to learn, learn, learn! In doing so one of the first things you’ll learn besides the topic you’re focusing on is who are the people in your field who are the respective experts. For instance it was a SQL Saturday event that I attended where I first learned about Brian Knight and how he was one of the best SSIS gurus around. So from then on whenever I needed to learn something related to SSIS I would defer to his blogs and his recommendations. I’m sure everyone has their own methods of learning from others but I just wanted to share my methodology. Another method that pays off is finding not only those guys who know their stuff but are also entertaining (that’s how I discovered Brent Ozar and SQLBatman).
 
Tip 6 – Never Stop Learning
This week is the SSWUG Virtual Conference and one of the great things that I’ve witnessed is that even the field experts are always learning something new from everyone else. In my opinion the one greatest thing to move forward is the willingness to always keep learning. And almost as important is this quote I heard once: “The ability to succeed is directly proportional to your ability to ask for help.”
 
So that’s pretty much all I can think of for now. Feel free to add your own tidbits and advice in comments below!

Categories
Review vmware

VMware Unveils New vSphere 4

vSphere Ok so now VMware has officially unveiled their new platform vSphere 4 (aka ESX 4.0) I figured I would give my quick reactions to today’s announcements. First off, to be fair, I’m a rabid VMware fan-boy. Not that I won’t give the other virtualization platforms a fair shake but from a business standpoint VMware is way out in front and with this new release it looks like they’re staying there. Second, will the folks at VMware PLEASE invest in someone to make a better presentation? You have enough capital, make it happen.

Here’s a quick rundown of some of the features that we’ll have available in this new version:
I’m sure I’m missing some but these are just the quick major points to run through. Kudos to VMware for acknowledging the movement of virtualizing databases and addressing that specific issue. With this release it looks like they really focused on optimizing an environment for database servers to thrive in. Today’s demo showed a virtualized Oracle instance hammering the server (CPU) on a physical box. In the new virtualized environment the server’s resources were much better and they were actually able to move 2 SQL Server instances on to the same box and performance still didn’t degrade by much. Now granted this demo was for Intel’s new Xeon 5500 processors and it depends on the type of database as well as 3,000 other "what-ifs" but at least it showed where VMware’s head is at. Brent Ozar recent did a webcast on performance monitoring your SQL instances and warned that once virtualized its much tougher to get true metrics from your instances so be wary with rosy numbers.
The next exciting feature I saw was thin provisioning of storage for VM’s. The way this works is that if you create a VM that you specify as 20 GB the system doesn’t really take 20 GB away from your storage, it only takes what is ACTUALLY being used. This is key since you actually start over-allocating storage to your machines which can be a blessing or a huge curse. What was really awesome is the fact that you can thin provision on-the-fly while performing a storage vMotion which I thought was really slick.
VMware’s flavor of clustering is finally coming to us in the form of VMware Fault Tolerance. I, for one, have been waiting for this with baited breath since often it is often a cumbersome and annoying process to setup a Microsoft cluster. Fault Tolerance technology allows you to run two instances of the same VM on separate hosts. If one goes down the other picks up the work seamlessly. The folks at VMware demo’ed this by bringing up a Blackberry emulator that had emails continuously streaming to it. The presenter pulled out the blade that held one of the VMs and the emails never stopped flowing. They also did a similar demo at VMworld with a streaming movie. Very exciting stuff!
The last big one I’ll go over is their new move towards policy-based management with Host Profiles. Anyone who has setup multiple ESX hosts in their environment can attest to the pains of discovering 1 or more of your servers had one little setting that was different from the rest in a cluster or environment which caused all sorts of headaches. Now with Host Profiles you create a standardized policy of what settings should be set in your host servers. Now when you deploy your ESX servers you simply apply this policy to your servers and you can see which servers are in compliance and which are not. The policy system also lets you see on the fly if someone makes a change and causes your server to fall out of compliance. Lots of really exciting possibilities with this especially in fast-growing shops.
Overall I was very impressed with the new offering although the recent naming changes for marketing’s sake I could do without. One thing that hopefully they’ll show on their website in the coming days is the improvement for monitoring in VCenter. When virtualizing your infrastructure metrics are gold and currently I feel the Virtual Center’s monitoring is OK but can definitely use improvement.  I’ve been pining for waiting this new release ever since the first announcement was made at VMworld so I’m very anxious to get a copy of this in our environment and start putting the new features to use and putting the virtualized databases through their paces. VMware states that vSphere 4 will be available "this quarter".

Categories
DBA SQL Server Syndicated Syndication Tips

Starting the SQL Journey: Part I

odysseus Recently at the VMware user group meeting I was approached by someone I used to work with. He worked in a non-IT role at my previous job and at his new job he was getting more involved in technical roles. He was attending the VMware meeting in order to understand virtualization better and expand his understanding of the technology. A question he posed to me was “So you’re the DBA at the hospital? How did you get started?”

So this entry will be two-parts, the first addressing how I personally got started and second will be a few tips for someone just starting on their path to follow.

Personally I fell into the database administration role due to my formal education background. In college I had taken some database courses. Originally I thought I would pursue a web development career so I was familiar with creating a web application with a database back-end. Fast forward post graduation and I had no .NET experience which was what the industry was calling for and I couldn’t find a job. Eventually I landed a role as a desktop technician for the Southwest Florida Water Management District. While in that position I learned that the one guy who held my position previously was the one doing the SQL Server administration and had a similar background to mine. Due to this fact I was named his secondary. It’s here that I got my first taste of the administrative side of SQL Server. I learned the basics of the SQL Server architecture,

As time passed my hunger to learn more than just how to do backups grew. Aside from asking questions of my fellow administrators I took to the web and read anything and everything I could. Another important step I took was joining up with the local SQL User Group. This allowed me to see not only what others were doing with SQL Server but it was my first experience with the SQL Community which was key in my journey. Attending the meetings grew into attending any event I could be it a paid training session my company allowed me to go to or any free event I could like SQL Saturday to help me expand my skills.

Eventually I moved on to my current position where I’ve managed to leverage some more advanced SQL DBA skills as well as taken on new challenges such as Sharepoint technologies.I continue using the same methods to learn and grow as I did when I started only now I’ve added some new tricks such as leveraging the power of social networks. In my next article I’ll go in to more detail about each step.

So how did you start your journey? I’ve never done this yet so I’ll try this calling out thing by tagging some of the people that have helped me out through their work. Everyone else feel free to leave your stories in comments!

Brent Ozar
SQLBatman
Pinal Dave
Jonathan Kehayias

Update: Part 2 of this great adventure
Categories
Presentation vmug vmware

University Community Hospital VMware Presentation

Hello everyone! Well our presentation last night went very well. Glenn actually came out of the meeting with a new iPod Touch so now he’s joined the Dark Side with a few of us others in the office that have iPhone/iPod Touch. I’ve uploaded our presentation to my SkyDrive (links below)

PowerPoint 2003 version – Click here to download
PowerPoint 2007 version – Click here to download

Overall it was a lot of fun presenting and I’m that much more motivated to work on more presentations to bring to our SQL Server User Group and one day, hopefully, even present at PASS! The slide deck is a little sparse on information as I’m not one of those “read everything off the slide” guys so if you have any questions feel free to leave comments below or contact me on Twitter. Any feedback is appreciated!

Categories
Syndication user group vmug vmware

Tampa VMware User Group Meeting Tonight!

Hey all just a reminder that tonight is the VMware User Group meeting here in Tampa. The meeting will be held at the Tampa branch of the Southwest Florida Water Management District starting at 5pm. Myself and Glenn Trail will be presenting on our VMware environment here at the hospital and I will also be covering our virtualized database servers.

http://communities.vmware.com/community/vmug/us-southeast/tampa

Time: 5:00pm – 8:30pm

Location: Southwest Florida Water Management District
7601 U.S. Highway 301 – Building One
Tampa, FL 33637

Directions: http://www.mapquest.com/maps?city=Tampa&state=FL&address=7601+Highway+301+North&zipcode=33637

To register: http://tinyurl.com/cx75jf

Agenda

5:00 pm – Introduction
5:05 pm – SWFWMD: The VM Saga continues – Jack Garvey
5:20 pm – Audience Q & A
5:25 pm – Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office – Chris Peek
5:40 pm – Audience Q & A
5:45 pm – University Community Hospital – Jorge Segarra-Rovira
6:05 pm – Audience Q & A
6:10 pm – Refreshment Break
6:40 pm – HP/Lefthand Networks – Mark Hall
7:10 pm – Audience Q & A
7:15 pm – Riverbed Technologies
7:45 pm – Audience Q & A
7:50 pm – Door Prize Drawings
8:00 pm – Birds of a Feather, Group Discussion, Vendor Off-line Interests, Information Exchange
8:30 pm – End of Meeting

Snacks will be available to all attendees and door prizes will be awarded at the close of this meeting.

Sponsored by Riverbed and HP/Lefthand Networks

Register today to join us for this free informative event. Space is limited, so respond as soon as possible to reserve your seat. 

Become a Tampa Bay VMUG Member or visit the community forum to stay current with updates: http://www.vmware.com/communities/content/vmug/localgroups.html